If you have ever switched to a new operating system you know how tricky it can be to find certain applications to replace the ones that you had. That’s why today we wanted to point out five excellent BitTorrent solutions that each run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. That way if you ever do decide to switch operating systems you’ll not only know which BitTorrent downloaded to grab, but you’ll also be familiar with it already.

This is the most full-featured cross-platform BitTorrent client that you’ll come across. Much like Firefox it benefits from being an extensible application via plug-ins, which over a dozen of are included out-of-the-box. Deluge includes a plug-in for a web user interface so that you can remotely view and manage your BitTorrent downloads.

At one point this was my favorite BitTorrent client, but it has transformed itself into a rather bloated application. The only thing that I really like about it is that it doesn’t render my network useless while downloading things. With some of the other clients no matter what limitations I place on them they continue to hog all of the network resources available.

BitTyrant is based off of Azureus 2.5, which was the last version of Azureus that was descent. The best part is that it offers faster downloads, and a sharing system that rewards users who upload more. I’ve used this application for quite some time, and the download speeds are definitely among the fastest of all the clients.

Fast – During evaluation testing on more than 100 real BitTorrent swarms, BitTyrant provided an average 70% download performance increase when compared to the existing Azureus 2.5 implementation, with some downloads finishing more than three times as quickly.

Fair – BitTorrent was designed with incentives in mind: if a user is downloading at 30 KBps, they should upload at 30 KBps. However, due to the unique workload properties of many real-world swarms, this is not always enforced. BitTyrant is designed to make efficient use of your scarce upload bandwidth, rewarding those users whose upload allocations are fair and only allocating excess capacity to other users.

Familiar – BitTyrant is based on modifications to Azureus 2.5, currently the most popular BitTorrent client. All of our changes are under the hood. You’ll find the GUI identical to Azureus, with optional additions to display statistics relevant to BitTyrant’s operation.

Opera is one of the only browsers that include BitTorrent support, but they kept it very simple. You can do things like change the port number and adjust how much bandwidth is allocated for downloading/uploading, but beyond that you’re out of luck. The goal with this is not to offer a full-featured BitTorrent downloader, and instead they focused on making something even casual users can understand. In fact downloading a torrent file in Opera is really no different than downloading a regular file, but I’ll forewarn you that it doesn’t get the best download speeds.

BitLet is not your typical BitTorrent application… mostly because it’s not an application. It’s a web-based tool that you can use to download torrents from any computer that has Java installed. Similar to the Opera browser the only things that you can configure are the port and upload speed, which is all a casual user will really need. The great thing is that I’ve actually received fairly high download speeds when using this, and it comes close to what some full-fledged apps get. There’s even a handy little bookmarklet that will get you downloading torrents in seconds.

–Overview–

It was actually more difficult than I thought it would be to find five BitTorrent solutions that all work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Each of the different operating systems have a variety of different BitTorrent downloaders, but there aren’t many that can be carried from one operating system to another. It’s apps like these that make the transition from one platform to another very easy for users though.

If you know of any other cross-platform BitTorrent solutions be sure to let us know in the comments.